Does any poet know if their work is any good? Some perhaps have that conviction, but at least during substantial moments I think the majority of poets have doubts. This drives some poets to ever tinker with and improve their writing, and causes others to abandon the idea of poetic writing as a useless pretention. Some even numb themselves to the question — yet anything that numbs doubts can overshoot and numb creativity too.

Do bus drivers and child-care workers have these doubts about their work? Do politicians or generals? Is a poet’s lack of confidence in their work generally less than other artists? Let me only take the last question. I do think more poets have more doubt, because their audience is usually small, and that audiences’ response is so muted. Actors, musicians, or other performers can expect immediate audience response, it’s in the nature of their work that it exists only in front of others. Poets, even successful ones, read publicly much less often than they write. The attempts at bringing performance to poetry, with slam and other spoken word variations are seen by many literary poets as corrupting the complex and more contemplative aspects of their art. Novelists, screenwriters, the authors of non-fiction and memoir, can lucidly dream of paydays that would be fantastical for poets, and it’s not unusual for poets to step aside from their poetry to those other writing fields seeking something they can touch and deposit on account from their work. Visual artists are as abstracted from their audiences while doing their work as poets, but we have no auctions of living artists poetry that bring bidders to the alexandrine numbers.

So, in such solitude, such silence, or even within the quiet, diffuse reverence of award-winning poets, there is most often doubt. What would it be like if poetry was on most everyone’s mind, if living poets were giants in our culture?

Since I started this project I’ve sometimes thought of Longfellow, an American poet who reached that level of achievement. The American culture of Longfellow’s era wasn’t more educated or entitled to access to high culture that we are today. Yet, I grew up in a town, and live in a city now, which from that time created streets and spots, and named them for him like we would for Presidents or Generals. My father and his father would know, would memorize his work. We do not need to travel back to Classical Greece or the Confucian Odes to imagine that level of poetry in our culture.

And yet. Longfellow has disappeared, and as far as those that do care about poetry this is regarded as neither mistake nor injustice. This isn’t due to scandal. AFAIK, Longfellow lived a praiseworthy life. He must have said or written some things we could condemn, but on the big issue of his age, slavery, he was on the side of the angels. He was a nationalist, but an internationalist too. He may have appropriated First Nations names and legends with insufficient grounding, but he did it to ennoble not dehumanize them. No, the main reason we have dumped Longfellow off the bookshelves of our culture is that he doesn’t excite or move us in the least. His poetry seems like old civic statuary covered in pigeon dung, not worth noticing, and not worth any effort to replace.

American poetry is a different country now, and Longfellow is exiled from it.

Inside poetry, in its provinces, and within old classics where we might still retain interest, there’s current discussion about Emily Wilson and her fresh translation of Homer’s Iliad.  Wilson has been clear in discussing her practice of translation. She assumes or assays that there must be something there in the archaic Greek. Her task, she writes, isn’t to make a work that sounds like the original text, or to bring us its most exacting word-for-word translation, but to make a new poem that works like the original must have worked for it to have had the impact it had — a version which we can by extension expect to be something like the authors best intentions. We believe this is what Homer deserves, regardless of if our tactics vary from or agree with Wilson’s.

We do this for Dante. We do this for Du Fu. We even do this to some degree with Shakespeare’s plays. We don’t do it with Longfellow. Why not?

We may think there’s nothing much there. We may think that Longfellow’s English is close enough to our modern English that to do so would be presumptuous or dishonest to the work. This last objection is a funny combination with the first. If there’s nothing worthwhile there, who cares what we do with it?

For a recent live in the studio LYL Band recording I decided to “translate” — or more exactly, extract and arrange for greater direct effect to the modern ear, a portion of a lesser-known Longfellow poem, one he titled “Epimetheus, or the Poet’s Afterthought.”  Epimetheus, for those not up on your Greek mythology is Prometheus’s contrasting brother. If Prometheus is a hero, however tragic his fate, Epimetheus is the “Oops! I did that?” guy, a total fool. Prometheus is the I’ll give humans fire and suffer the eagle eating my liver forever hero. Epimetheus is the ”What’s in that cool box, Pandora. Let me have a look” disaster.

In my version I left Epimetheus out of it. Pandora too. Longfellow’s poem is a Friday-the-13^th thirteen stanzas long and would require more melody and virtuosity than I can muster to capture a modern listener’s attention. I cut it to three stanzas, modified a couple of pieces of archaic word-order, killed one perfect rhyme for a near one. I did this because I think there’s a core in the piece that might speak to me or you without delay or overly baroque elaboration — and that’s the intent I found in Longfellow’s subtitle. If you write, particularly if you write poetry, you likely know the feeling: that joy and initial appreciation of the inspiration that carries you into the first draft, only to be followed by the problems of realizing the best poem that escapes us. And the completed poem? It travels out to a place where there are only wanderers like us.

Here’s my much shorter adaptation of Longfellow. The full poem as originally published is linked here.

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You can find that performance of my revised version of Longfellow with the audio player many will see below. Don’t see any audio player?  This highlighted link will open a new browser tab that will have such a player.

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